Tag Archives: war

The War We Don’t See

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This is a topic that I’ll probably expand on later, but I was just reading an article discussing the role of Hamid Karzai’s brother in the present Afghan conflict.  This article gets at an issue that I’ve thought about before.  From the FP article cited above: But he could not exist without the support of coalition forces. AWK has long worked closely with, and perhaps been paid by, the CIA, for whom he helps operate a paramilitary force, according to press reports.   As some of my research interests deal with the role of bureaucratic agencies in foreign policy, I find this particular chunk Continue reading The War We Don’t See→

Bargaining with Your Right Brain

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A friend outside of political science linked me this post asking if we deal with bargaining models in political science.  For those of you who are not in the know, one of the mainstays of contemporary International Relations game theory treats war as a bargaining process between states.  As such, the author argues that traditional bargaining models in economics are too simplistic to truly capture the moves that exist in a negotiation between two actors in the market (the two examples he provides deals with bargaining over small purchase).   While scholars of the Cuban Missile crisis may vehemently obejct Continue reading Bargaining with Your Right Brain→

BRAINZ!… Zombie Movies and War, An Odd Correlation

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I have to admit, when I first read the post “War and Social Upheaval Causes Spikes in Zombie Movie Production” , I was a bit skeptical about the conclusion that was drawn dealing with the correlation between war and the number of zombie movies produced in a given year. So I collected data and ran a model. As it turns out, there is a statistically significant relationship between the number of zombie movies produced and whether a war was fought within a two year time period.  More after the jump…

When War and Academia Collide

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Academics in all subfields of political science often lament that policy and military failures arise from the lack of communication between policy-makers and the academic community.  The recent tragic death of Michael Bhatia highlights some of the issues involved with the tenuous collaboration between those who analyze data and those who generate them, and the sometimes unfortunate consequences.  Bhatia was killed on May 7 in an explosion that targeted the American soldiers with whom he had been embedded in Afghanistan. Bhatia had been teaching at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies as well as working on a doctoral degree Continue reading When War and Academia Collide→